The 2007 Appalachian State-Michigan game was supposed to be a cakewalk for the Wolverines, college football's all-time winningest team. But by the final frantic seconds, executives with the game's broadcaster—a startup called the Big Ten Network—had crammed into the station's control room in Chicago to watch the ending.

Down by two, Michigan called on its kicker to try a game-winning, face-saving field goal. BTN president Mark Silverman expected the Wolverines to prevail. He told his colleagues that this would be the best possible launch for the network, which was two days old and struggling to strike deals with carriers.

"Wouldn't it better for us if he misses?" said BTN producer Leon Schweir.

It turned out even better yet—at least for everyone besides the Wolverines.

Appalachian State blocked the kick and pulled the upset, one of the biggest in sports history. Now, as the two teams met again this weekend, it is also clear that the shocking result had a more lasting effect: It was the game that changed the business of college football.

Seven years later, Michigan avenged that stunning loss, asserting its supremacy Saturday in a 52-14 win over Appalachian State to start both teams' seasons. But the game was almost unrecognizable from what it was then. The 2007 matchup came at a time when TV-rights fees were about to boom and athletic-department revenues were on the verge of skyrocketing. It helped ring in the era of conference realignment that temporarily consumed college sports and made the Big Ten Conference emerge as a financial titan.

But the most remarkable aspect of the game's impact was exactly what made it so meaningful: Few fans outside Ann Arbor that day even saw it.

At the time, the Big Ten Network—a joint venture between the Big Ten and Fox (which until recently was owned by the same company as The Wall Street Journal)—had carriage deals with only DirecTV and a handful of small cable operators. These amounted to fewer than 20 million subscribers and no more than 20% of the Michigan television footprint, Silverman said.

The first game BTN aired resulted in a powerful lesson that helped the network reach deals with major distributors, including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, before the next season: Even matchups that looked lopsided could turn into must-see television.

"We were trying to tell people the Big Ten Network is a legitimate network," said Big Ten deputy commissioner Brad Traviolia. "Immediately it dispelled the idea that the Big Ten Network would not carry big games."

That paved the way for the phenomenon of conference- and school-specific programming that has overtaken college sports and made its business bigger than ever.

ESPN's Longhorn Network came to life in 2011 and loaded the University of Texas with by far the most revenue of any athletic department. But it also helped drive away Texas A&M from the Big 12 to the SEC and ended a football rivalry between the two schools that had been played every year since 1915.

The new SEC Network, an ESPN venture that covers the Southeastern Conference, launched this month and had deals with almost all major carriers in place before airing its first football game Thursday. Two weeks into its existence, the SEC Network already has 62 million subscribers—more than the BTN's 60 million homes.

"Had the Big Ten not done well," Schweir said, "the whole concept would've been given second thought."

But the BTN coming first came with a financial advantage for the Big Ten. In the 2007 fiscal year, the year the network flickered to life, Michigan's athletic department earned an $18.8 million cut from the Big Ten. That number swelled last year to $26 million and is expected to increase past $30 million in the next two years.

The financial injection gave the Big Ten more incentive to expand and an edge over other conferences as schools made a game of musical chairs out of their conference memberships. The Big Ten has added Nebraska, Maryland and Rutgers since 2010 in an attempt to expand its footprint and increase the value of the BTN—even though many fans say the latter two additions have come at the expense of watered-down schedules and the Big Ten's centurylong Midwestern heritage.

Yet the current landscape of college football hasn't favored the Big Ten. Since the start of the 2008 season, the Big Ten is the only one of the top five conferences not to send a team to the national-championship game. This season, its top contenders are No. 5 Ohio State and No. 8 Michigan State, though they were omitted from many preseason College Football Playoff projections.

Michigan, which last won the Big Ten in 2004, isn't expected to end that drought this year, either. The Wolverines came into that Appalachian State game off a season in which they were one win away from playing for the national title. But they are on their third coach—Lloyd Carr, Rich Rodriguez and now Brady Hoke—since the Appalachian State game. Michigan hasn't finished any season since that game ranked in the top 10, and the Wolverines once again begin this season unranked.

As much as Appalachian State beating Michigan benefited the Big Ten Network, though, BTN executives say the network would have hit its stride eventually—and that the instant intrigue wasn't worth the agita in Ann Arbor. "I still wish Michigan would have won," Silverman said.

Yet the crushing loss still has a place in BTN history. Schweir, now a senior vice president for the Pac-12 Network, asked a Michigan representative before the game to send him a game-used football as a memento from the BTN's maiden broadcast. Now, despite the game's outcome for the Big Ten team, it is displayed in an awards case in the lobby of the network's offices.

Rich Rodriguez was the coach for this game and it proved how small he was. He'd been sleazy enough coming from WVU and he should have been fired immediately after. The program had been much more honorable (UM never played a I-AA team before he arrived)

The app state game confirmed the michigan program as an embarrassing also ran--an eerie and unthinkable outcome for one of the true blue chip elite programs in college football. Programs like ohio state and usc that were decimated by cheating and rules scandals after michigan stumbled against app state have bounced back far faster than michigan has. But as for the sport itself, it was well on its way to being ruined long before the blocked kick. Decimating the conferences was the final nail in the coffin. Given the fact that there's only a handful of programs--literally 2 or 3--that have any legitimate shot at winning a national title, the only thing the other 120 programs really have going for them year after year are their traditions. Destroying so many old rivalries in the pursuit of something so crass as a larger tv "footprint" is insane. Rutgers has as much business playing big ten football as the barbadian cricket team.

Right, right. And the 2006 OSU/Michigan game was the greatest in history, as I recall the WSJ hyping. Just a preview of what should have been a national championship rematch. Only both those teams got humiliated in their bowl games.

App State 2007 game was just a huge upset of a program in decline. Nothing more.

"Seven years later, the sport is almost unrecognizable from what it was then." Wow, that's some pretty fevered hyperbole. The "sport" is pretty much the same. The way we watch it, I agree, has changed some.

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